Who Are The Main Characters In A New Leaf?

If you're asking about 'A New Leaf', that title actually points to a couple of different stories people often mean — the best-known ones are the 1971 dark comedy film directed by Elaine May and a 2014 South Korean legal drama. I’ll walk through the central players in each, since both are pretty memorable for very different reasons. The 1971 film centers on two incandescent leads. Henry Graham is a charming, washed-up playboy who’s hit rock bottom financially and decides to marry rich — only to find himself unexpectedly tangled in real feeling and moral confusion; Walter Matthau plays him with that brilliant blend of mischief and vulnerability. Opposite him is Henrietta Lowell, played by Elaine May, a painfully shy botany professor and heiress whose guileless kindness and obsession with plants slowly disarm Henry and reshape the whole tone of the movie. Around them are colorful supporting figures who push the plot’s comic and dark edges: Andy McPherson, the scheming lawyer (Jack Weston), Harold the valet, Henrietta’s well-meaning household staff, and Henry’s rather avaricious Uncle Harry. The way those characters ratchet the stakes from screwball caper to something oddly tender is what makes the movie stick with you. The 2014 Korean TV series titled 'A New Leaf' (개과천선) flips the premise into a legal-reform story and anchors it on two main characters. Kim Seok-joo, portrayed by Kim Myung-min, is a razor-sharp corporate lawyer who’s basically a shark at his job until an accident robs him of his memory and forces him to re-evaluate who he is and what he stands for. Park Min-young’s Lee Ji-yoon is the moral counterweight: she’s an idealistic, blunt, hardworking lawyer from a modest background who believes in justice even when it’s unpopular. Their relationship — the grown-up tension between pragmatism and conscience, plus the slow rebuilding of identity after trauma — drives the series. The drama also features strong supporting turns from Kim Sang-joong and Chae Jung-an, whose roles help expand the show’s focus from personal growth to institutional critique. Titles repeat across media, so if you had a different 'A New Leaf' in mind — a modern novel or a short story that uses the same phrase — those exist too and tend to center on similar ideas: a character turning over a new page in life and the people who challenge or enable that shift. For the two major versions I described, the film’s focus is a darkly comic, character-driven reversal (Henry and Henrietta), while the K-drama leans into redemption and social justice (Kim Seok-joo and Lee Ji-yoon). Both stick with me for how honestly they handle change: one does it with sly satire and the other with earnest moral drama.